I felt a desire of meeting Dewaia.
Mother sat in my room until I fell asleep, a habit since my childhood.
In the afternoon, I woke up and decided to venture out to revive the memories of youth and to find Dewaia near the shrine. My mother advised me to return early because it was the first foggy day of the year. I came out into the street where the thick grey fog was enveloping every rooftop and sidewalk in the city. When I was young, my brother and I used to play hide and seek on foggy days. Although everything seemed the same, the streets were filled with another breed of people. There were no teenagers laughing with hysteria at the tea stalls while the old people walked by with their canes, frowning at the carefree laughter of youth. And there were no children. I learned to play many games out there like Cokla Chapaki, Guli Danda and Kbadi. I stood there for a while trying to listen for the playful sound of children, but there wasn’ t any. All that was left were my delightful memories of childhood. Nowadays, children were busy with computer games and it seemed humanity had lost its innocence of early years.
I reached a point near the Saint’ s tomb. A place where desperate people weighed down by the threat of poverty and disease prayed for good fortune and offered their hard-earned money to the caretaker of the saint’ s tomb. Parents brought their children, to ask the saint for high marks in their next examination. With no change in the lives of poor people, the caretakers had become very rich. During my childhood, I remembered whenever an annual festival took place at the saint ' s tomb and pilgrims came in droves. Temporary vendors opened shops. It was much more appealing to me than visiting the tomb. Moving around these shops was an experience because the place was so lively. People sat at tea stalls narrating how their wishes were granted. The colourful local sweets on wood burning stoves were my favourites.
After I stopped to have my favourite sweets, I entered the courtyard and stood at its perimeter. A man danced, lost in his dhamal, a traditional dance. The drummers hit the dhol with rhythm and farther away camel moved slowly from the mountain into our small town. The ringing bells around the camels’ neck were adding to the rhythm of drums. I focused on the man as he danced. I could feel the ecstasy of Malang. It was Malang Alladewaia.
I called to him aloud,“ Dewaia!” He looked at me, smiled, blinked his one eye, and then was lost again in his ecstasy. There was a familiarity to his dance … familiarity one feels listening to a folk song after years.
I sat there waiting for Dewaia to finish his ecstatic dance. I had known him most of my life, and through my travels, I thought of him often. Seeing Dewaia’ s dance took me back to those beautiful days of our village life. I remembered him wearing a black or green cloth with chains and beads, and his long dark hair was combed straight back, to the collar of his long shirt and tucked behind his ears. In the hot summer afternoons when Baba and Grandpa slept, my cousin and I often visited Dewaia in his hut outside the village. It was made of a thick layer of straw, covered with date matting. He was a free-living, free-loving and caring man. He would wake up with the cooing of pigeons. To him, the entire world seemed in tune with their tranquil notes. He would open the door of the birds’ mud cage saying,“ Fly away and find your grains in the fields. I am not left with much.” He earned his livelihood by dancing at the village saint’ s tomb, on weddings, and with Shias during the ten days of their mourning month. At Christmas, he would sing with Christians and celebrate Diwali with Hindus. During my stay in the village, I never saw him going out of the village but now he was there at the saint’ s tomb in the city. I was surprised to see him in the city. I kept watching him, twisting, twirling and turning to the beat of a dhol.
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